Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memories, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated hardware and software arrangements have evolved to take advantage of the technology, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One of the areas in which progress has been made is managing computer resources in a distributed computing system. Conventionally, distributed computing environments often require complex management schemes and systems for distributing the tasks that constitute the complete job to be performed. The complex management system is responsible for collating the processing results. Such a distributed computing environment requires a linked, dedicated, cluster of computers for performing such processing. The computer cluster usually is a linked group of conventional motherboards containing local disk controllers via a network device. Thus, the network speed is limited by the performance of communication medium, including the network device.
Computer designs have been based on grouping devices that have had similar operational speeds together, so mechanical hard drives which typically had millisecond response rates were grouped together separately from CPUs and memory that resided on a motherboard which had nanosecond response rates. Traditionally disk access has been more of a bottleneck problem than a network switch. Thus, a network switch able to distribute processing across various computer systems has not been an issue. Now, however, solid state drivers (SSD) have been developed which operate at memory speeds and can even exceed speeds at which some current bus controllers can manage. No longer are hard drives a bottleneck of the system, rather they soon will operate at the same speeds of the typical CPU, memory, or any of the processor local bus architectures (Intel®, AMD®, Server ARM® chips, RISC®, IBM® . . . ) which used to be reserved for communicating between the memory and CPU.